Can China Innovate?

The subject lies well beyond my competence. I report it here for your interest, but, more importantly, to address a question that has bedeviled American pedagogues.

Simply put, American academics reject the Chinese, i.e. Tiger Mom, approach to education on the grounds that it is too rote, too automatic, too unthinking. Thus, they propose, teaching children the Chinese way, where the teacher's authority is never questioned, will stiffly creativity and innovation. By this calculus Chinese business, especially the high tech variety, should depend on great innovators from America. The old saw was that Chinese scientists could merely imitate what was being produced by the great creative minds of America.

Apparently, such is not the case. Two stories, one from the Guardian and the other from Wired tell an entirely different story. Given my limitations when it comes to the future of technology, I will report them without much commentary.

From the Guardian:

The economic rise of China has been accompanied by a waxing of its scientific prowess. In January, the United States National Science Foundation reported that the number of scientific publications from China in 2016 outnumbered those from the US for the first time: 426,000 versus 409,000. Sceptics might say that it’s about quality, not quantity. But the patronising old idea that China, like the rest of east Asia, can imitate but not innovate is certainly false now. In several scientific fields, China is starting to set the pace for others to follow. On my tour of Chinese labs in 1992, only those I saw at the flagship Peking University looked comparable to what you might find at a good university in the west. Today the resources available to China’s top scientists are enviable to many of their western counterparts. Whereas once the best Chinese scientists would pack their bags for greener pastures abroad, today it’s common for Chinese postdoctoral researchers to get experience in a leading lab in the west and then head home where the Chinese government will help them set up a lab that will eclipse their western competitors.

As you already know, civilizations clash. They compete for advantage and for influence. The question playing itself out is whether China, with its authoritarian and hierarchical social structure can compete with an America that values diversity and that imagines that all people have equal natural talents.

The Guardian reports:

However, the pattern seems clear, and is worth heeding by other nations: despite China’s reputation for authoritarian and hierarchical rule, in science the approach seems to be to ensure that top researchers are well supported with funding and resources, and then to leave them to get on with it.

And also, Wired suggests that Chinese companies are moving to the head of the technology pack:

Researchers and companies in Beijing and Shenzhen are increasingly setting the pace for global technology development. “Large Chinese companies now have vast troves of data to hone artificial-intelligence experiments and can develop functions that the west may learn from, or copy,” says Qiang Yang, a professor of computer science at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Yang leads a team of researchers collaborating with Tencent’s WeChat platform, which has about one billion accounts to draw data from. In emerging fields such as AI, generally supportive government policies combined with generous salaries are already helping China’s internet titans lure top talent away from western rivals: in anuary 2017, former Microsoft executive Qi Lu joined Baidu to lead its AI efforts, including autonomous vehicle development. In other cases, Chinese tech firms simply acquire foreign competitors, as when China’s Midea Group acquired KUKA AG, the German robot-maker, last March.

Such progress has attracted venture capital:

In 2014, it [China] overtook Europe as a destination for venture capital, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers. Currently three of the world’s top five most highly valued private companies are Chinese – ride-hailing giant Didi Chuxing, phone maker Xiaomi, and e-commerce firm Meituan-Dianping.

China is moving ahead. It is innovating. It is either catching up to or moving ahead of America and Europe. In the meantime American tech companies are setting up diversity initiatives and offering new sexual harassment sensitivity training.